The astronaut, the portal, and the alien

~a short story and commentary~

by Jon Rappoport

June 17, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

“You want to forget about billions of people who are operating through mind control as old as human history, just forget all about them, and still have a revolution that works for more than a few months? You want to forget about the possibility that, buried under all that mind control, there is a very different human being? Suppose, for example, the psyche is equipped to see and use language itself in a way that’s foreign to us? Suppose this language allows us to view a reality we can’t even conceive of now? Suppose this language sends signals to our endocrine systems and our chemical and biological processes undergo their own revolution?” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

Here is what he said in a closed room in Houston when he came back. Here is what he told the men at the table.

“You see it wasn’t just a planet, it was a portal. That was the thing it took me so long to figure out. But when I finally did, I walked through it. Easy as pie. And then I was somewhere else.

“Somewhere that made no sense at all. There were…things there, but I couldn’t identify them. I couldn’t put names to them. I’d never been in a situation like this before.

“I thought it might be a puzzle. A game. But what were the rules? There didn’t seem to be any. I was lost. So I just started walking. I don’t know how long I walked. You tell me I’ve been away for eleven months. All right. But it doesn’t feel like it. I can’t put any sort of time stamp on it.

“One thought came in on me, over and over again. I was in a different universe. I felt that very strongly. And if it was organized, I couldn’t find the pattern. I looked, believe me, but I couldn’t find a two and two that would make four.

“So for a very long time I rejected the whole place, the whole setup. I spent a lot of time rejecting it, saying no. I refused to believe there was nothing I could identify or describe. Do you know what I mean? I couldn’t put words or ideas or feelings to that place—so I refused it. I negated the whole layout forcefully. That was my main experience. Because who would ever imagine being in a landscape where things were so strange he couldn’t find a single word to convey them to anyone else?

“And then, finally, I remembered something. From my college days. A professor of mine took me to a theater, and there was a play being performed by these crazy actors. They spoke in a language no one had ever heard of. It went on for almost an hour. I felt myself getting very angry. A few minutes before the end, I was hit by lightning. I suddenly understood everything they were saying. I don’t know how. And I couldn’t translate it back into English. I just understood. It was a one-time experience. And that was what it was like, being in that universe on the other side of the portal.

“When I remembered this, I felt a shift. I knew where I was. I knew what was going on. I knew that universe. But I can’t sit here and tell you what it was. That seems impossible to you. But it’s true. I’m stymied. One thing I can say. Everything I once thought I knew about beauty…that’s gone out the window. I’ve realized there were certain rules embedded in my mind. Not rules exactly. Maybe principles. Principles of harmony, symmetry, balance. Organization. I was living according to those rules or principles all my life, in all my choices, and now they’re gone. They don’t exist anymore. When they evaporated, I was able to understand what that universe was. All at once.

“On the trip home, I started to draw. You’ve seen my work. You’ve looked at it, and you wonder whether you can use it to decipher what happened to me. But you can’t. I was just inventing out of a vacuum. A wonderful vacuum. I was drawing spontaneously.

“I was working from nothing, a void. It’s quiet there. You can improvise endlessly.

“I’m not asking you to understand it. I don’t feel you need to.

“I just know I stumbled across something. I never wanted it or looked for it. You’ve told me the drawings mean nothing to you. That’s fine by me. I didn’t do them for you.

“All the vast telemetry we have? The codes and symbols and shorthand, the measurements? The markers and the baselines and the scans? I’m not interested in them anymore. I don’t have the slightest bit of interest.”

There was silence in the room.

“Sounds like you got religion,” one man said.

“No,” the astronaut said. “I had religion before. Now I don’t need it.”

More silence.

“I feel,” the astronaut said, “like a tiger who just walked out of the zoo.”

Security men stepped into the room. They had their guns out.

But the ops chief held up his hand.

“It’s all right,” he said. “We’re fine. This man found something. Let him go. No one will understand him. We’re protected. We’re all inside the protocol.”

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—Anyone who reads much science fiction eventually comes across a story about an alien who lands on Earth and falls into the hands of the US government.

The military holds him in a facility, while scientists try to figure out how to communicate with him. They run all sorts of tests, of course, and they bring in experts.

The solution sometimes occurs in the form of higher mathematics, “the universal language.” Equations on a page, and the alien perks up.

I’ve never read one of these stories that satisfied me. The “breakthrough” always seemed too easy. I mean, suppose the alien was so different he spoke a vastly strange kind of language, based on principles that would, if we discovered them, make absolutely no sense to us?

His language would be absolutely meaningless, no matter which way we turned it. It might somehow be invisible, soundless. An empty space, perhaps. We’d perceive it as a vacuum. We’d have nothing to compare it to.

And then, for our own deep-space missions, we’d have to train our astronauts to deal with this situation. What would we do?

Our language tends to fall into two basic categories. Subject-verb-object. Or the “sentences of being.”

Jones cracked the stone. Action.

Jones is a man. Being.

Two structures.

There is the little-known work of philosopher/linguist Ernest Fenollosa, the author of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry. Fenollosa analyzed modern Chinese words back to older pictographs that minimized nouns. Instead, these ancient pictographs, at one time, presented a view of reality that was far more dynamic and shifting, in which action was the main event. The subject and object of a sentence were themselves of lesser importance, and were related to one another by their mutual participation in that action. “To be” verbs—is, are, am—were just dead ducks. Irrelevant.

Suppose we had a language in which every noun is also a verb, in the sense that it throws off rays and curves and vectors of action and energy.

What would we have then?

We might, at the extreme, have an endless supply of dynamic universes. No potted plants.

We would be communicating with each other in a way that instantly gave birth to possibilities beyond current meanings embedded in our style of speaking and writing. The implications of each word of text would jump and leap. Instead of peeling off layers to get at the precise definition of a word, we would automatically be proliferating it.

Language, created by consciousness, also feeds back to it. And this feedback informs our way of viewing reality. The structure of language becomes, in a true sense, a monitor on what we can see and what we can’t see. What we can imagine and what we can’t imagine.

It’s as if a psychologist, running one of those old inkblot Rorshach tests, told the patient: “Guess what? There’s nothing wrong with you. Forget all that nonsense. Look at these shapes and imagine anything you want to. Tell me what you invent. Then I’ll do the same. Pretty soon we’ll be speaking a different language, and we’ll levitate out of this worn-out reality…”

Having supper at a restaurant, you’re not likely to have your companion say, “Looking at this piece of salmon, I see a shoot-out between a twelve-legged insect and a flock of flying goats.” But why not? It might relieve the predictable monotony.

Let’s cut out middlemen: therapeutic evaluators, test givers, interpreters, system junkies.

Instead of the standard blots, print out all sorts of complex shapes on a page and say, OK boys, THIS IS A LOST LANGUAGE. FIGURE OUT WHAT IT MEANS. WORK ON IT.

Then if you can nudge or inspire or bribe people to do that, they will work for a few years on believing there is really something there, something that is embedded in the shapes, and they’ll dig in and try to “decode” it. A few more years and they might throw in the towel and say, “The hell with this, let’s just make it up. Let’s say each shape means whatever we imagine it to mean, and each shape can change its meaning from minute to minute.”

Then they start writing to each other with these shapes and thousands of others they make up—and gradually, they forget about the notion that they might be crazy. After that, glimpses and glints begin to surface in their minds. They don’t know what they are, but they feel they’re de-conditioning themselves from any language they previously knew. They’re out in open water. Their operational concept of Understanding is undergoing a revolution.

They realize how tightly they clung to their old basic notion of Meaning.

They drop that. They discard it in the garbage, because they’re fascinated with the glints and glimpses they’re getting. They want more glimpses. They’re inventing this language with no rules and no assigned structure.

They’re experiencing sensations of flying and soaring. These sensations are feeding back into their body processes and into their minds. The hard wiring is giving way.

You could say they’re astronauts training for a mission in which they’ll encounter an intelligence that’s completely alien to Earth.

There are analogues to what I’m discussing here. For example, microtonal music. You tune a piano so that, altogether, 88 keys display the range of sounds contained within just one octave of a conventional piano. Going from the lowest note to the highest on the microtonal piano, you hear thin slices and graduations of notes that cover, all told, no more ground than one octave of a normal piano.

You sit at the microtonal piano and you play. And play. And play.

You listen to what you play.

At first, it’s repugnant. It’s not only dissonant, it’s absurdly muddy.

But after a few months of playing that piano every day, you begin to hear something. It comes through. And the sensations it brings might remind you of places you’ve been, experiences you’ve had. But they go further, into a void where new sensations and meanings you can’t name are possible, are happening. Are real. Eventually, super-real.

These sensations flood your endocrine system, and new proportions and sequences of hormones are produced. You experience feelings you’d forgotten or never had before.

The spectrum of feeling and thought expands.

Your whole notion of what you can experience and understand changes.

Your imagination is gearing up.

You never seriously considered there could be seven comprehensible sounds between any two keys on an ordinary piano. Now, you’re not only hearing them, they make sense. They convey emotion.

This would be like saying that, between each pair of words in a sentence, there are seven other words, and every one of them is an action verb.

When you understand that expanded and exploded sentence, you can talk to the alien from Parsec-12. He can talk to you.

After your first conversation, when you walk out of the facility where he’s under heavy guard, take the elevator down to the parking lot, and drive through the gate, you look at the desert and you see things you never saw before.

You understand why magic was hard to do. It was all supposed to be taking place in a tight reality of unbreakable connections. Impossible. But now those connections have snapped. The landscape, any landscape, is much more inclusive and malleable.

You’re reminded things were this way once. And now processes in your body open up. There is a reason for them to change. They secrete information and energy that have been dormant for a long time. Dormant, because there was no use for them.

The cells in your nervous system wake up to a remarkable degree. They’ve been waiting for this moment. They turn off the perverted game show called Life they’ve been glued to for 40 years. They project rays in all directions. Your physical aliveness shifts up exponentially.

Through the walls of the holding facility behind you, you can see the alien. He’s nodding at you. Yes, he’s thinking. You’re getting the message.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com